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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 975 posts.

Tech Industry & Business
2012
276

9to5

Last week, 9to5mac published this article in which the author intentionally derided me and Instapaper, called it “Instascraper”, and initially accused Instapaper of being responsible for the now-debunked “FBI” UDID leak. Despite my attempts to get them to correct what they wrote, they refused.

277

Black Swan Farming

September 2012 I've done several types of work over the years but I don't know another as counterintuitive as startup investing. The two most important things to understand about startup investing, as a business, are (1) that effectively all the returns are concentrated in a few big winners, and (2) that the best…

282

APIs for Manufacturing

Perhaps you too remember that crayon-factory segment from Sesame Street. The one where they show dramatic shots of hot orange wax getting poured into vats and molds and eventually labeled and boxed up into neat packages of the rainbow, while Skrillex-junior music played in the background. This was my favorite segment…

287

Why Tarsnap doesn't use Glacier

On the surface, Tarsnap sounds like the perfect use case for Glacier. Out of every TB of data stored on Tarsnap, in any given month approximately 100 GB of data will be deleted, while only 33 GB of data will be downloaded; in other words, Tarsnap is very much a "write once, read maybe " storage system. Tarsnap's…

291

“Me-too” products are fine

This is a guest post from Alex Yumashev. Alex is a founder of Jitbit – a UK-based self-funded startup with a suite of customer support oriented products. You can find his blog at blog.jitbit.com and meet him at the Business of Software 2012 this October. —————————————————————————————————————————————– Does this sound…

295

Tacocopter Basics

The Tacocopters are coming. Sure, the original pitch was a clever troll aimed at credulous and impatient fast-food junkies. But the numbers don’t lie – a typical taco weighs less than a pound, and aircraft that can autonomously fly a few dozen ounces of payload to your doorstep are already available for around a…

298

Introducing human.io

My small startup, Tasty Labs, has recently launched human.io . Human.io provides a simple way to allow a publisher to turn a passive audience into a mobile army of participants. This allows publishers to easily create missions and activities to get people involved more directly than just reading stuff on a screen. If…